Hanging Off The Balcony
by The Illustrious Crackpot
Summary: Lazlo pays Patsy a midnight visit with a very important question.


**Hanging Off The Balcony**

(The Illustrious Crackpot)

Acorn Flats: the most luxurious Squirrel Scout camp in the Western hemisphere. Every facility was very comfortably set up, shielding innocent young girls from the horrible inconvenience of nature even while encouraging them to enjoy it. There was never a single speck of dirt out of place on the whole grounds, the pastel pink cabins were perfectly maintained to prevent the entry of a spare dust mite, and the feather-light beds were as soft and inviting as a heavenly marshmallow. On this deepest of summer nights, nearly all lights on the premises were off, leaving each and every female to their pleasant, possibly rock-star-infested dreams.

Every female but one.

A small trace of light flickered through a single window of a single cabin; strong enough to see by, but not strong enough to wake a slumbering friend. It played softly across the blanketed toes of a tall, redheaded giraffe girl nestled firmly in a sea of magenta, lingering momentarily on the iron frame of her bed and crawling off towards the nearby vanity. More dimly did it cast a glow on a blonde young alligator wrapped in her sheets like a straitjacket, snoring heavily through sharp teeth in the bed furthest from the light. Brighter it illuminated the row of monogrammed towels across from a single empty bunk, and brighter than that lit up the widely smiling face of a pink-haired mongoose, fully dressed in her blue-green skirted uniform even at the late hour.

Fumbling around in a small beige box, Patsy drew out a match and struck it, tenderly transferring the flame to a thick orange candle wedged in a holder on the floor. The sweet scent of tangerines wafted through the air, tantalizing her senses. Patsy giggled, letting out a long sigh as she looked from the newest burning candle (it was merely one of five) to the monument she was illuminating.

To look at it, the first word that would pop to your mind would be "shrine". And then, mere moments later, "stalker". Indeed, a shrine it was, a bevy of photographs all lovingly preserved in macaroni frames, photographs of a young monkey boy with fur the color of a summer sunrise. Only in one picture had he been posing, and that was a page torn out of the Camp Kidney annual yearbook. The other photos one could only imagine had been taken in secret, with a camera borrowed from a fellow Squirrel Scout—as well as a borrowed marker, it appeared, by virtue of the large "X"es running through any person unlucky enough to have been caught in the same picture as the monkey. Daintily arranged around these snapshots were other momentos: an old black shoe presumed lost, a used tissue, a snippet of unsuspecting fur. It was a truly impressive statement of dedication, as well as enough evidence to have nearly anyone locked up for several years.

"Laaaaaaaaazloooooooooo..." Patsy breathed softly, staring dreamily at the display. Her poofy salmon-pink hair practically curled from the intense emotion as her face dropped into her brown palms, eyes still locked on the shrine. This was the reason she _lived_. "I _love_ you, Lazlooooo..."

But she couldn't simply go out and _tell_ him this. The almost needlessly complex structure of her female mind scoffed at the idea. No, any movement must be _subtle_; kind words, special treatment, all in the interest of making _him_ fall in love with _her_. For full romantic impact, the boy had to be the one to ask out the girl. Anything else was practically blasphemous.

These were the rules of love that a young girl operated on.

It had been hard for Patsy, at first, to follow with this sacred code, as she was a bold, take-charge sort of individual, the kind Candice Bergen would have loved. But long (and forced) exposure to sappy high school romance movies had shown her exactly how to act around a crush, the central dogma of female conduct. And so she had to control herself around her primate beau, settling for a smile rather than a bone-crunching hug and a request to sit near him rather than an offer to share a lunch.

But she now felt that she'd had enough. She knew, down to the hours, exactly how long she'd known and loved Lazlo, and she was ready for a real relationship. _Had_ been ready for a few months, actually, and been waiting on tenterhooks to be asked on a date; unfortunately, Lazlo hadn't seemed to have gotten the same cosmic signal as her, and hadn't made any move to take the initiative. In light of this, Patsy supposed, it was permissible for her to help him along.

Spitting into a delicate handkerchief, Patsy quenched out the central candle of the five, causing a small wisp of citrus smoke to form around the wick. The superior nostrils of Gretchen, the alligator girl, twitched at this new release of sickly orange scent, and she rolled over in bed with a groan. Patsy tensed, head snapping towards her friend, but Gretchen was in too deep a sleep to be roused so easily. The mongoose sighed in relief—magic only worked if done in secret.

"Okay," she whispered to herself, smoothing down her skirt as she settled into a kneeling position, chunky purple sneakers folded up underneath her long tail. All right. There was her shrine of every piece of Lazlo memorabilia she owned. And there, surrounding it, were the four burning candles and one extinguished one. Plucking from the shrine her favorite photograph (one of Lazlo with pink cake frosting smeared across his face, taken at a Squirrel Scout/Bean Scout joint picnic), she clutched it against her heart and stared directly at the blackness of the ceiling.

"_Dearest one I love so much, like this may we two soon touch! Forever bound—_"

To her great surprise, Patsy was cut off by a smart rapping noise from the other end of the cabin. Springing to her feet, she whirled around to face the window, the apparent source of the knocks, and squinted to try to identify the form outside. The night was very dark, but the candles were just bright enough to cast a faint illumination on the visitor's small, slim build, scruffy orange fur, and smiling yellow mouth. Patsy's heart skipped a beat, and in a flash she'd run up and flung the window open. "LAZLO!"

She hadn't finished the charm to bring him there, but he'd come on his own! At last, at _last_ he was going to ask her out!

"Hi, Patsy!" the monkey returned cheerfully, lifting his tan beanie off his head in salute. He seemed to recall himself with a start, poking his face into the room to look around, and his next statement was in a lower voice. "Are Nina and Gretchen asleep?"

"Yes, Lazlo..." Patsy was practically bursting, bouncing up and down on her tiptoes with both hands firmly grasping the white windowsill. She brought herself as close to the opening as she could without actually positioning any part of herself outside, her voice still breathless. "Why'd you come, Lazlo? Miss Mucus _hates_ Bean Scouts, and she'd KILL you if she found you!" She hadn't meant for the last sentence to come out in an exuberant squeal, but she simply couldn't contain it with him so close by.

Lazlo seemed ignorant of both her tone and the threat to his well-being, instead rattling off a short chuckle and waving his hand dismissively. "Oh, _Rhubella?_ She wouldn't do a thing like _that!_ We go waaaaaaay back." In the obscurity behind him, Patsy saw the monkey's tail give a sudden jump as he remembered something, and Lazlo looked directly into her eyes. It was all she could do to keep from melting on the spot.

"I need to ask you something, Patsy. It's been on my mind all night."

Patsy's smile slowly grew wider, and her face lit up like a display of fireworks. "Oh—okay, Lazlo," she exhaled with forced composure, her knuckles growing white from her tight grip on the sill. She giggled a little, then gasped in a phenomenal revelation and brought herself still closer to the window. "_Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague? How camest thou hither, tell me? The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here!_"

There was a small pause after this proclamation, and Lazlo cocked his head to the side while blinking his utter confusion. "...Huh?"

Giving a small sigh at the lost romantic element—though this overpowered by her reflexive giggle at Lazlo's adorable obliviousness—Patsy explained. "It's from _Romeo and Juliet_, in the balcony scene...Denmother Doe's been making us read it for our Translation Skills badges. A-anyway, you're outside my window, and you'll get in trouble if they find you..." She hunched up her shoulders to try and stifle another giggling spasm, hardly daring to squeak out the next sentence. "It's like you're Romeo and I'm Juliet!"

Lazlo had been enthralled during this entire conversation, his fur practically standing on end as his eyes grew wider. "Wowwww...that's so _cool!_" he cried, then slapped his hands over his mouth at the slip as Nina moaned in her sleep. Crouching down a little so that only his eyes and the tip of his head showed above the windowsill, he asked in a hoarse whisper, "Who're Romeo and Juliet?"

Muffling another giggle, Patsy replied unconcernedly, "Never mind, Lazloooo..." Toeing the floorboards, she tried to bring the conversation back in its original direction. "Sooooooooo...what did you want to ask me, Lazlo?"

The monkey immediately perked up. "Oh yeah, _that!_ I—"

Gretchen grumbled some form of derogatory remark in her sleep, and Lazlo stiffened reflexively. Once certain that the fierce Squirrel Scout wasn't about to wake up and pummel him into oblivion, he whispered to Patsy, "Could you kinda come outside...?"

Without a moment's hesitation, Patsy gripped the edge of the sill and vaulted over, landing neatly on on the short-cut grass outside the cabin. Trying to preserve her air of femininity, she smoothed down her skirt and tugged at her bright orange vest, smiling sweetly up at Lazlo. He returned her grin with a happy one, then scratched the back of his head and looked nervously around at the stillness of the campground. He seemed to be a little worried about how out in the open they were. "I-is there anyplace we could talk?"

"The _roof_," Patsy returned decisively, taking a bold action and actually grabbing Lazlo's slender, furry hand. Her insides did belly-flops at the touch, but she willed herself to ignore it, pulling her monkey crush around to the front of the cabin. The darkness of the late hour slowed her somewhat as she dropped to her knees and began rooting about (one-handedly) beneath the pastel porch, but at length Patsy managed to pull out a thin, sturdy metal ladder and set it up against the side of the cabin, stepping back and turning breathlessly towards Lazlo.

"Isn't that a little...dangerous?" he inquired concernedly, cocking his head to the side a little and motioning vaguely towards the roof with his free hand.

"Not at all, Lazlo!" Patsy pointed in the gloom towards a long red-and-white-striped tarp protruding beyond the edge of the row of shingles, propped up by columns affixed to the porch. "If you slip, Lazlo, the awning'll catch you." Another small sigh. "Don't worry, Lazlo..."

She'd always had a strange fixation with sitting on roofs. Being as high as she could, and still sitting down—not like on an airplane or in a skyscraper, but actually being _surrounded_ by the outdoors. And that thrill of doing something that it doesn't seem like many people do. That was what had possessed her to "borrow" a military-regulation stepladder from her father's closet the night before she'd come to Acorn Flats.

Lazlo's hand was somewhat limp in hers—he wasn't really grasping hers back, but at least he hadn't snatched it away. It seemed more like he didn't quite know _what_ to do with it. Patsy was just pondering this when Lazlo's long tail jumped again, curling slightly into the appropriate shape of a question mark. "...How come you keep saying my name, Patsy?"

_Because I love to say your name. Because I love the way it sounds, and to always remind myself that you exist. That you're __**Lazlo**__, Lazlo._

"No reason," she giggled, then, reluctantly, released his hand to grasp the sides of the ladder, shimmying up it and onto the cold roof like a professional. Turning around, she looked down at Lazlo on the ground. "C'mon, Lazloooo!"

Within seconds he was seated on the roof next to her, his species having a talent for speedy climbing. He leaned back with palms pressed firmly against the shingles and extended his legs, glancing up as if in passing and then doing a severe double-take, staring fully up at the sky with an expression of childlike amazement. At length he turned back to face her, eyes bright with wonder as he pointed upwards. "Look, Patsy! Aren't the stars _beautiful?_"

Seeing as Patsy had been more interested in Lazlo than the sky, she hadn't even really noticed that there _were_ stars out. But when she lifted her eyes to look, she couldn't hold back a gasp of awe. Though the heavens were the deepest, darkest midnight blue ever to be found outside a description by Lemony Snicket, the stars were as bright as fireflies, swirling in patterns across the vast expanse and glimmering with a piercing white light. Patsy even momentarily forgot about Lazlo, enthralled with the incredible sight.

"Nina once said," she breathed slowly, hardly blinking in case the sight disappeared when her eyes closed, "that some stars are so far away that it takes _thousands of years_ for the light to come to earth. So, when we think we see a star, it might actually have exploded a long time ago, but the light of that hasn't reached us yet."

"_Cooooooooooooool!_" Jumping onto his feet with characteristic agility, Lazlo began bobbing up and down on his toes and gesturing frantically at the sky. "D'you think _that_ star has any freaky fish-eyed llama beings on it? Or maybe all the llamas went EXTINCT and we don't know 'cus of the light! Oooh, ooh, or maybe _that's_ a planet of half-men, half-LIMA BEANS! Just _waiting_ to conquer the llamas, if they're still alive!"

Patsy's face dissolved into another adoring smile as she watched him go on and on, always finding some kind of interesting backstory for each celestial body he could see. This was the Lazlo she loved best—the Lazlo who was always excited, always whimsical, and who could always find something incredible in what others considered the mundane. Because of this, she waited until he'd finished his speculations and grinningly plopped himself back on the roof before she probed again.

"What did you want to ask me, Lazlo?"

He gave a small spasm of recollection, fumbling frantically to slap his hat back on his head as it slipped off. "Oh yeah, _that!_" Lazlo's expression turned serious, and he faced Patsy with a firmly set jaw. "You're the only one I'm going to ask this, Patsy. I want you to know that."

"Y-yes, Lazlo...?" Patsy immediately began fussing with her hair and the hem of her skirt, trying desperately to cover up her eagerness. But every time her eyes flickered back towards his, he looked just as determined—a fact that endeared him to her even more.

"No, I _mean_ it," he repeated, as though her quick reply had implied that she didn't quite believe him. He shifted himself to the side so that he was fully facing her. "I won't ask anyone else. Just _you_."

This, as could be expected, provoked in Patsy a mad giggling fit. She was practically hysterical from anticipation. Clasping her hands together so tightly that it started to hurt, she turned towards Lazlo too and leaned a little closer to him. "_Yes_, Lazloooo?"

Lazlo took a deep breath, composing himself, then continued to fix her with that same even stare as he solemnly stated his question.

"Patsy, is your hair naturally pink or is that dye?"


End file.
